Reply #8: Whoa.... Read this!! [View All]

[Melinda]

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“I’m not pointing any fingers at anyone,” Nagin said. “But I was in the fire. I was down there. Where were they? I’m confident the truth is gonna come out. But I want everybody’s record analyzed just as hard as mine.

“Listen, this was unprecedented. Nothing has ever happened like this. For people to sit back and say, ‘You should have done this, you should have done that’ … it’s Monday morning quarterbacking. They can shoot if they want, but I was there, and I will have the facts.”

Nagin’s biggest frustration, and his biggest source of puzzlement, is the slow pace with which relief arrived. He said state and federal officials made repeated promises that weren’t kept.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I mean, this is America. How can we have a state with an $18 billion budget and a federal government with an I don’t know how many trillion dollar budget, and they can’t get a few thousand people onto buses? I don’t get that.

“All I saw was a huge two-step, if you will, between the federal government and the state as far as who had the final authority. Promises made that weren’t really kept. It was frustrating. We’d analyze things, double-check them, and then, later in the afternoon, we’d find out that someone was changing the plan, moving resources around.”

<snip>

Nagin has previously said he didn’t think the slow response was related to the demographic of the overwhelmingly poor, African-American crowd that needed rescuing, his thinking has evolved.
Definitely class, and the more I think about it, definitely race played into this,” he said. How do you treat people that just want to walk across the bridge and get out, and they’re turned away, because you can’t come to a certain parish? How do resources get stacked up outside the city of New Orleans and they don’t make their way in? How do you not bring one piece of ice? “If it’s race, fine, let’s call a spade a spade, a diamond a diamond. We can never let this happen again. Even if you hate black people and you are in a leadership position, this did not help anybody.”

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It's surreal.